Sundance selects Wheaton professor's film

The Sundance Film Festival has selected one of Wheaton film professor Jake Mahaffy's most recent short films for screening at the international festival, which starts in mid-January.

The film, Motion Studies: Inertia is one of 83 short films selected from more than 5,000 works submitted by U.S. and international filmmakers hoping to have their work shown at Sundance. The festival, which runs Jan. 17-27, reports that submissions for this year's screenings grew by more than 15 percent over last year.

Mahaffy's film charts the absolute distance that a man can run at full charge when wearing a complete suit of armor. The film, he says, is inspired by Muybridge's 19th century photographic studies of animal locomotion.

"I wanted to watch a man collapse from overexertion, worn down by the weight of all of his supposedly heroic martial accoutrements," he says. "And I've always been fascinated by the Middle Ages and this short is part of my research for a larger project."

Filmed on a farm near the Wheaton campus last spring, Motion Studies: Inertia is the latest in an ongoing series of films that document various forms of motion and investigate the scientific principles behind them. An earlier short in the series, Motion Studies: Gravity, was also screened at the Sundance Film Festival.

Mahaffy came to Wheaton in 2006 to start the college's film program. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. He has made many short films and a feature-length film, War. He's currently writing a screenplay about a man who tries to perform a miracle and fails, as well as editing a feature film, Wellness, about a pyramid-scheme salesman in a small town, and working on a series of experimental short films. Some of his work can be seen at www.handcrankedfilm.com. News about the college's film program and the work of Wheaton students www.myspace.com/wheatonfilm.